Most people who disdain the ultra-rich, I can say, don’t scorn them nearly enough. Just as equally, the enablers and flunkies, the savvy marketeers that make a lucrative living catering to exclusivity and over-priced goods, rarely get the share of disdain and criticism they deserve for their role in the increasingly out of touch and wasteful lives of the elite, the same elites who make the decisions elsewhere that govern our economies, banking system, and wield enormous influence on media and government institutions. The kind of wasteful extravagance seems trivial, but it matters when you realize how the entire system actually changes people’s neural structures, reducing ability to emphasize with others, increasing the sense of self-importance, and messing up the ability to weigh the value of actions.
It is entirely unsurprising that in our current climate, there exists an entire cottage industry of ultra-expensive food, targeted at rich gourmets, an industry whose extravagance is only matched by its frivolousness. There are various, usually small, reservation-only, elite and often outwardly unassuming eateries in America and around the world that charge thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, for single meals. Even for plebeians such as myself, this world is visible online and in the rarified worlds of Social Media. And note that by ultra-expensive, I am not referring to 300~400 dollar course sets, as are common at fine dining restaurants in expensive, downtown locations in major cities around the world and include 12~20 courses of labor intensive foods featuring extremely high quality ingredients and excellent service. In fact, everything up to around 500 dollars a person, is still in the range of paying for atmosphere, experience, and excellent food (as a gourmet). However, that is admittedly being generous, as the fundamentals of the meal don’t particularly change between an affordably priced 60 dollar a head meal and a 500 dollar a head meal.
But no, the Michelin 3-Star restaurants in Paris running for 350 dollars a person are simply the sailboats compared to the super yachts I am talking about; 70,000 dollar pizzas by private chefs who typically do catering and contract work exclusively for billionaires, dishes that cost thousands of dollars a piece, fruit platters that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. I am speaking to the kind of food that exists, usually hidden, in the behind the scenes, secretive, and ultra-expensive enclaves catering to the super rich. This is the difference between buying a Rolex and a Patek Philippe; the truly rich don’t even ask about price, save to flaunt how much something cost as a status symbol.
This is a small niche, but I find that it embodies quite well the gross, pointless, and somewhat pathetic pathos of extreme wealth in the modern world. These stratospheric prices for single dishes also represent the end point of a long-chain of subversive cons on the ultra rich, as marketing, branding, and small food providers manage to sell “heritage hams”, cured steaks, aged cheeses, hybrid fruits, and so on. The key point lies in scarcity, hawking products that require years of storage, such as the hams aged up to 3 years, with emphasis on special diets and breeds for meat, while playing up the labor-intensive and mostly extinct cultural traditions used to produce the products. In one sense, it is ironic that capitalism both destroys cottage industry craft and then its biggest beneficiaries turn cottage industry, small-scale craftsmanship in food into a super-luxury item. Thus a single unprepared aged ham costs a thousand dollars (or more), and the chef then dumps all sorts of labor onto it where the concern isn’t so much taste as with making it as expensive as possible. I have seen a general reaction from influencers eating these expensive dishes;: they tend to be underwhelmed, and generally iffy on the taste. This is, rather than a failing, reveals a perverse logic of the entire industry; unlike the ultra-competitive, taste-sensitive world of fine-dining, this rarified elite world prioritizes putting out baroque dishes overloaded with flavors whose main design component is the price tag at the end, because the appearance of extreme luxury is branding, and creates demand.
A typical process may go like this: 1000 dollar aged heritage ham, where the chef uses a cup of some 40~100 year aged Louis XIII Cognac (which is intended for sipping, comes in a hand-crafted glass bottle with a 20-carat gold lip and costs some thirty thousand dollars; hell an empty bottle of the Black Pearl edition can auction for thousands of dollars), to make a fucking reduction sauce, then slaps on some black truffles (nearly everything has hundreds or even thousands of dollars of black truffles dumped on it), and to get a sufficiently pointless and outlandish look of Trumpian luxury, wraps the whole thing in gold leaf. Boom. On the platter for your group of 4 is a 4,000 dollar roasted ham. Expensive wines? Forget the wine and high end spirits, you can still be set back 80 dollars (a 6-course meal at plenty of more affordable fine dining restaurants) for a single glass of aged apple juice from some elite, special, private farm that doesn’t sell on the general market. The ridiculous price inflation we’ve seen for decades among snobby, high-end wines has now fully trickled down into high-end eateries as well.
Again, the ridiculousness of the whole culture lies in preposterous ingredients, including heavy use of caviar, black truffles, foie gras, saffron, specialty small-production cheeses, and elite “brand” meats, with overpriced wine and spirits used as marinades and stock bases. The entire idea of using an aged alcohol—which is a long and costly production process that mellows out the alcohol flavor and heightens other flavor compounds—to cook with is as absurd as using a dry-aged premium grade wagyu steak to make sloppy joes. The effusive presence of gold leaf brings to mind an episode of SpongeBob where the titular character has to cater for an elite party and crafts the show’s eponymous hamburgers, Krabby Patties, but encrusts them with jewels to make them “high-class”. Making a carbonara with some 13-year aged artisanal parmesan from some small cheesemaker who only releases 2 wheels of cheese a year, a 6000 dollar wine, black truffles, and Beluga Sturgeon Imperial grade caviar (20,000 dollars or more a kilogram), served topped with saffron and gold flakes isn’t fine dining, it’s simply dick measuring for those who have immense wealth and who cannot fathom the value of their resources or devoting their excess wealth to helping others.
Super luxury food is as pointlessly opulent as giant yachts and private jets. Rather than efficiency, running cost, need, or any practical concerns, it is consumption for the purpose of displaying wealth and success. Spending the yearly income of a full-time Walmart employee on a single meal (without including wine or high-end spirits), is simply a power play, asserting the authority and importance befitting someone of great wealth. I see in it a continuing pattern of the culture of Western Capitalism and how that shapes what in academic circles is referred to as praxis around the world. It is not necessary to be a Marxist or socialist to take a sour view of corporate and elite excess around the world and in the enormous amounts of hoarded capital they have stashed away to hide from taxation and other social obligations. A capitalist can look at it as well and be rightfully disgusted by the misuse of valuable resources and the creation of a class of bloated con artists making lucrative livings selling simple services and products to the rich at woefully elevated prices. Offshore accounts and the huge hoards of wealth themselves represent failed opportunities to properly invest capital in new ventures and new innovations, while lax laws around exorbitant wages to elite managers, and most of all, the effervescent power of stocks to generate fiat wealth in turn distorts and contorts the principles of capitalism itself.
Seeking profit margin and self-enrichment above all else has created systems that are no less illogical than spending a quarter million dollars on catering for a private party of friends. These systems are designed to maximize profit on behalf of the person who holds capital at the expense of those selling labor, regardless of whether the processes involved are actually carbon-efficient, environmentally friendly, or time-efficient. Hence while you may think it would be more efficient for a massive corporation selling canned foods to contract American farms to grow apricots, then process them in a central plant relatively nearby and from there distribute them around the country, what makes the most profit is actually contracting low-wage, low-regulation farms in Chile to grow your apricots, then ship those apricots to Thailand where they are processed and packaged in sugar syrup and plastic cups, then ship those apricots back from Thailand to Los Angeles, where underpaid independent contractors unload them from overcrowded docks, then from there ship them around the country. No matter that you’ve done a circle around the entire Pacific rim to get each shipment of product, this is still, for everything from apricots to critically important pharmaceuticals and computer chips, the cheapest way to maximize profit. When the entire structural set up of companies is more or less about driving stock prices up, increasing dividends, (and for the owners of capital, increasing their wealth unendingly), low-energy cost, localized chains of production and circular economies make as much sense as owning a 78 million-dollar Gulfstream G700 Jet whose interior is the equivalent of a Hilton deluxe suite does to the rest of us.
This is not to make an argument for closed economies, and indeed sometimes outsourcing does make sense, when production chains are extended so that processing and mid-level manufacturing can be done closer to requisite natural resources. Surplus production, as well as regional specialization does happen and this can increase labor and energy efficiency. The problem is that the over-reliance on such extended supply chains has weakened labor and environmental laws, increased carbon footprints, gutted small-scale independent businesses and local economies, and concentrated largely unregulated power in a few hundred corporations and a few thousand billionaires and unelected corporate CEOs and upper managers, the very same folks who are so utterly unmoored from the sense of value and money that they will pay 1000 dollar entrance fees to elite, secretive clubs and cigar bars, to drink 500 dollar cocktails and be attended to hand and foot like a king, and yet will lay off 1700 workers in Youngstown, Ohio (just like you snap your fingers), if the would reduce overhead on that production line by 4.27 percent.
The argument in favor of all this labor outsourcing, which is that American wages are too high and reducing labor and production costs is the only choice companies have to keep prices low and not be undercut by cheaper foreign-made products, also makes as much sense as a 27,000 dollar bottle of white wine. The figures I have found for the average cost of a new car in 1980 in the US was about 7000 USD, which runs about 23,456 dollars today, compared to the actual average cost of a new car being 45,000 dollars, with a disturbing trend of basic car functions (seat warmers, navigation, radio, etc) being turned into monthly subscriptions in luxury cars, which are typically ahead of the curve in what direction the industry is moving towards. A base Honda accord sold for 24,000 USD (inflation adjusted) in 1985, so imported cars weren’t selling much cheaper than domestic manufacturing. So despite all this outsourcing on a massive scale, cars still cost about twenty thousand dollars more on average than you could expect them to cost in 1980. This is the same for a host of other manufacturing goods. Agricultural goods, using cheap migrant labor, and revolutionary (drastic) increases in yield, efficiency and output have only managed to keep prices of goods like sugar, bread, milk, eggs, and so on roughly stable (compared to inflation), rather than the transition to fully industrialized agriculture, using industrial levels of fertilizer, pesticides, modern seed varieties, giant scales of production and so on having a substantial downward impact on prices.
The great lie of neoliberal reform and modernization, which is so central to the world view and interpretative vision of not just the ultra-rich, but their enablers, handlers, and all the millions of high-income, urbane and educated sub-elite (who also occupy the highest spots of government bureaucracy and represent most of our decision-making political class), is that it provides more freedom of choice for consumers while lowering prices and at the same improving quality and somehow also increasing income to labourers and farmers. The Silicon Valley tech billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, and the Koch's all have a pretty similar outlook, which is that these market liberalizations, expanded supply chains, and profit margin-obsessed capitalist systems benefit everyone. And they point to large decreases since the 1980s in the number of people living in extreme poverty globally, and they point to rapid technological advances. Liberalization makes goods cheaper, creates more selection for consumers, and empowers small producers. These assertions are not-data free, something that makes them far more pernicious, but they use cherry picked data to show an overly rosy picture and often rely on small-scale exceptions to general industry-wide trends to make uplifting examples of savvy entrepreneurs who have managed to break the mold.
One example of this is coffee. Ironically, two of the most expensive coffees in the world come from beans literally dug out of shit. I find something cosmically funny and hilarious about rich idiots paying 500 dollars a pound for coffee beans that have been dug out from elephant shit in Thailand or 400 dollars a pound for coffee beans from wild palm civets' fecal matter in Indonesia (the infamous Kopi Luwak). I’ll leave the pithy observations to others, but the point is coffee is a huge industry. The drink is consumed in ever larger quantities, there are hundreds of specialty chains and thousands of local cafes in the US alone. Coffee is also a subject that came up in grad school in Anthropology, (Paige West’s ethnography of Papua New Guinean coffee production, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive). Prior to 1989, the US, through the International Coffee Organization, whose founding was also spearheaded by the US in 1963, partially to combat communism in the developing world, regulated coffee production, stabilizing supply and production with the International Coffee Agreements. Then, with communism in collapse and a conservative government in power, the US pulled out from the ICO in 1989, which led to the collapse of the system that had stabilized the industry for more than three decades.
Now, for people who love coffee as much as I do, the collapse of the ICA system has been absolutely crucial to the development of the industry. Quality is up considerably, variety in roasts, regional and even single-grower blends are widely available even to lower middle class people (indulging in a little splurge once and again), when before, these things simply didn’t exist, and market was absolutely dominated by a handful of massive, Fordist-style industrial scale production, with maybe two choices in roasts from a handful of big corporate providers using a mishmash of beans from all over the world, some not very fresh, roasted in huge batches and processed into the kind of extremely generic tasting coffee that my older friends associate with their childhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. Liberalization of the market has created a niche for many small independent roasters, and helped showcase the diversity and complexity of flavors that coffee has to offer.
Yet, two thirds of the market for ground coffee is still controlled by just 4 companies, Folgers, Maxwell House (now owned by the enormous Kraft foods conglomerate, but whose heiress was intimately tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex rings), Starbucks (which is at this point a massive, industrial roaster infamous for over-roasting and burning its beans, in the words of one trader interview in Paige West’s book, absolutely ruining gorgeous, high end beans, because Starbucks entire design is predicted on dumping huge quantities of fat and sugar in the coffee, rather than enjoying the base flavors of the ingredient), and Dunkin’ Donuts (whose retail products are outsourced to the parent company of Folgers, lol). With Keurig cups, retail sales and the like the same pattern plays out; roughly 70% of the market is controlled by the same four companies, and another 20% probably comes from secondary brands like Community Coffee (the only mid-scale, regional, family-owned private coffee roaster and retailer with any major national market share, and the pride of my home state of Louisiana), international conglomerates like Nestle, and discount generic brands produced by retailers like Walmart, Costco, etc. This is to point out that liberalization reforms have been followed by large-scale consolidations of every industry (for example, Disney now literally, single-handedly, controls nearly all of the animation and film industry in the western world), which means that rather than choice, what consumers have been given is the illusion of choice. Cargills, Unilever, Nestle, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Kelloggs, General Mills, Mars, Tyson Foods, ConAgra, The J.M. Smucker Company, Grupo Bimbo, and Campbell’s Soup Company—these fourteen companies alone control the overwhelming majority of everything that Americans eat and drink.
Illusion of choice aside, the increased consumer awareness of coffee and its actual flavors is nice, but when the US pulled out of the ICA, the quota and price system collapsed. By 2001 coffee fell to its lowest price in history. This is no trivial matter, as coffee makes up half of agricultural exports from tropical countries by value and the decades-long price slump has stifled economic progress and development in rural farming communities and local processors around the world. Two hundred million people depend on coffee growing for their livelihoods. Growers are now increasingly exploited by unscrupulous wholesale buyers and middle-men, and even those expensive Fair Trade labeled, 16 dollars for 12 ounce bags of beans coffees that well-meaning Leftists buy, pay the growers rates of only about twenty-five cents to the pound of beans. Growing coffee is not easy business, it requires lots of work pruning, maintaining orchards, picking fruits, and preliminary processing (separating beans from the fruit, washing them, partially drying them before transport and so on). Each coffee harvest represents a year of work and thousands of hours of investment from small scale land-owning farmers, often indigenous peoples (as in Papua New Guinea), for which they receive only a few thousand dollars for. If they can produce several thousand pounds, and have the equipment and education to properly prepare and process the beans before transport, and secure coveted deals with Fair Trade Organizations that pay a premium but also demand high quality beans. Surges in fuel price mean that the majority of farmers selling to the general market may yield less than 200 USD for their yearly crop. Why? Because coffee grows well on partially shaded, well-drained, volcanic soils at higher elevations, with no frost and ample water and sunshine, which means major growing belts are often in hard-to-reach areas. Most of Papua New Guinean coffee has to be transported from growers to processors via helicopters and small cargo planes, the cost of which is taken out of the already low payment for the coffee itself. A single coffee tree will yield about 4,000 beans, equivalent to 1 pound of coffee, a year. At as little as ten cents a pound, to get an income of 1 US dollar a day, requires a farmer to manage 3650 trees, which again, are not a simple crop (especially Arabica beans that sell for much higher prices than bitter Robusta varieties that are much easier to grow and more disease resistant).
Harvesting, to say nothing of managing orchards and pre-processing, accounts for a third of all manual labor that goes into making coffee beans for market consumption. All told, as much as half of manual labor is expended before the green beans even make it to wholesale international coffee traders, and yet this segment of the production process receives less than 5% of the total value of the product. All the while hundreds of millions of small-scale growers remain in poverty across the Global South, commodity traders in Hamburg and New York City control the global market; the overwhelming majority of beans are processed and sent to these two trading centers. These cities are where prices are set, deals are inked, and extremely well-paid elites pick through beans, observe quality, consider potential buyers, and purchase unroasted beans for wholesale. The group that makes the most money however, are roasters, who make very lucrative turnovers and create the most added value in the process. Retailers cut of the pie is the last step, and thus consumers pay 16 dollars for a specialty coffee a farmer made 10 cents for selling the unroasted beans to make.
Any industry where small-scale producers are hyped incessantly in media and which advertises itself through a cultural milieu of decentralization, self-realization, and small independent business, if you look past the window dressing, is just the continuation, even worsening, of weakly regulated corporate capitalism. Craft Beer? Four corporations account for 79% of all beer sales in America and prohibition era laws throttling distribution outlets (largely controlled by big corporate brewers) make it insanely difficult even for successful and established craft brewers to distribute beyond their states. Within the small 21% of the industry not controlled by multinational corporations with massive capital and production resources, the bulk of the “craft beer” label is controlled by Yuengling (the oldest brewery in America and the largest completely American-owned brewery in the US) Boston Beer or Sierra Nevada and perhaps one or two other small, successful local brewers, like Abita and Bell (which was just sold to a large international conglomerate). 8,800 beer makers and an endless chatter about the innovation and variety available, but beer consumption is declining overall and the market is so over-saturated that almost no new micro-breweries are capable of distributing beyond their own bar. Choice is an illusion, when there are 8,800 brewing companies, and 8 of them control about 85% of the market.
This is true across the board with agricultural commodities. Chocolate? Nestle (a comically evil corporation whose CEO has also declared that human beings don’t have a right to water) has been exposed numerous using child labor, often provided by contractors engaging in child trafficking and child slavery. Cashews. Leather. Palm oil and avocados. So basic essentials, despite 40 years of technological revolutions and cheap labor, as well as massive centralization along major corporate agriculture actors (greater efficiency at scale), have more or less tracked inflation, while cars are more expensive, TVs and consumer electronics have indeed gotten cheap, and household appliances have most gotten cheaper (and break more often, but are vastly more energy efficient). Unfortunately, college, housing, and medical expenses (including healthcare) have exploded titanically in cost, while in most of the world average wages have seen almost zero growth in 30 years. In Japan, a chronically low inflation country, the median wage is literally the same now as it was in 1990 (4 million yen a year). The result is that poor people remain at the same rates as they did in the 1980s, despite decades of promises that cutting taxes and deregulation would create more prosperity, while the bulk of the middle class now experiences perpetual financial anxiety and has limited purchasing power. Hand in hand with this is an ever larger class of startling wealth and privilege, billionaires, but also endless lists of multi-millionaires with second homes and multiple new cars, jetting off to transnational vacations three or four times a year in first class seats.
Promises of prosperity have come true only for a small percentage of the population, and for billionaires, they now have more influence, wealth, and more luxury than in any period since America’s Gilded Age. The existence of tacos that cost thousands of dollars and wristwatches that run for a couple of million dollars, implies the unfettered luxury of the rich, but so do the delusions of Silicon Valley. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and the Billionaire Space Race to rush ahead of where the technology for space travel is (and the weird obsession with abandoning earth, sci-fi dystopianism, and colonizing Mars and so on among the ultra rich), to Peter Thiel (an Afrikaner Nazi vampire), and his hundreds of millions of dollars to MAGA and alt right causes and hundreds millions more to immortality ventures. Bezos has wasted a lot of money for a market that is still decades away and even in the 2030s is being projected as a brand of ultra-luxury vacations for the niche class of rich assholes who would pay 50,000 dollars for a 2 hour cruise in low-earth orbit, while Thiel’s technological and social investments have yielded little but social disruption and fanned authoritarianism (the dark side to Silicon Valley is how it preaches openness and liberalization while idolizing authoritarian corporate leadership as key to innovation). This is the state of society we find ourselves in, whose weaknesses and continual closeness to total collapse were exposed by SARS-Cov2 (on a scale of 1~5, with 5 the worst, merely a level 2 global environmental disaster) and its aftermath.
The crisis we face is one of values, namely the disconnect between wealth and utilitarian value in the upper classes around the world, the very folks who control both the levers of capitalist investment and government policy. This is where I have come to understand the power of humility, not in religious terms, but as the highest form of subversion of capitalist excess. More than that humility is a form of objectivity; a necessary prerequisite for empathy, ethics, and reasonable decision-making. Humility is nothing less than the ability to set aside personal investment in the meanings of what you own and consume, what you do and the talents you possess, an ability to remain aware of your position vis a vis other people in society. The problem is, as even an absolute clueless wanker like Andrew Wang realized, that success in any form warps the human psyche, because of how successful people, powerful people, are treated and put upon pedestals. Humility is the root of irony, mental flexibility, thrift, and caution, and without it, the rich and elite are nothing but a joke, as the Italian artist Maurizo Cattelan showed with his contemptuous and infamous “banana duct-taped to a wall” art installation (which sold for 120,000 dollars, completing the Avant Garde artist’s joke).
As it so happens, the banana was worthless, as a performance artist ate one of the installations for free, and another banana could always be bought at the super and attached with duct tape, a poignant point on the ridiculous creation of runaway added value based on the pomp and circumstance around the object, rather than the object itself. Then again, one buys a 2000 dollar taco for the same reason: to be seen by others eating a 2000 dollar taco while the world is on fire.
Crossposted to my blog: theravingsofthaneauxthemadcajun.wordpress.com/...